One major common problem faced by cellular and landline service providers is market competition. In today's climate of competitive markets, cellular service providers have found that one way for them to grow market share and defend their businesses is to be proactive and form alliances, and to partner with landline service providers. In addition, cellular service providers seek to differentiate their service offerings, and to capture the largest portion of market revenue by meeting an ever increasing demand for access to a wide range of media forms such as MP3 encoded audio, still and video imaging, data, instant messaging, and email. In a similar manner, the landline service providers have found that to grow market share and ward off competition, they too must be proactive and form alliances, and to partner with cellular service providers. Support for broad economical access to these converging forms of communication is needed to enable unfettered market growth, and to support the development and use of new handheld devices needed to provide increasing levels of mobile multimedia communication functionality.
Although the formation of alliances and partnerships between cellular service providers and landline service providers may help to ward off competition, such alliances and partnerships are faced with other problems. For example, the erection of cellular infrastructure such as cellular towers may be an expensive venture since this may require acquisition of real estate, whether in the form of outright purchases or through leasing. Cellular infrastructure also requires the establishment of one or more expensive backbone links to handle core network traffic. Another cellular-related problem is that the cellular signals do not penetrate and propagate in buildings such as homes and offices very well. This is especially true with the frequencies that are typically utilized in the United States, which may vary between 800 MHz and 1900 MHz or 1.9 GHz.
As users of wireless communication devices move about, the quality of the wireless communication path may change drastically. In some cases, conditions degrade to the point that the wireless communication path is dropped, when the wireless access device or the network determines that satisfactory communication is no longer possible. The decision to end the call is normally made without user input, and is generally based upon criteria determined by the maker of the wireless access device and/or the network infrastructure equipment. Although their current wireless network may be impaired, users of wireless access devices may migrate within the coverage areas of a number of other wireless networks without knowing of their existence.
In other circumstances, a user may be aware of the existence of the other wireless networks, and may take advantage of such networks when in a geographic location served by a known wireless network. Many more wireless networks may exist than those of which the user is aware, and the user of a wireless access device may therefore be unaware of the opportunity to make use of those other networks for communication. Some of the available networks may be suitable for the communication activities of a particular access device user, while others may not. In addition, wireless service providers are continually adding new network capabilities and features, and new wireless service providers enter the market each day. Depending upon the number of active subscribers and/or users, and the activities of each subscriber and/or user, a wireless network that one day provides satisfactory quality of service may, on another day or at another time, be unable to meet a particular wireless access device user's needs.
Further limitations and disadvantages of conventional and traditional approaches will become apparent to one of skill in the art, through comparison of such systems with some aspects of the present invention as set forth in the remainder of the present application with reference to the drawings.